• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Troubleshooting frame assembly

Windows

Old Oak
Joined
Jan 25, 2022
Messages
1,433
Reaction score
433
Location
Cumbria & West Kent
I’m dry fitting together a window frame (2x2s with mitred bridle joints). Individually the sides appear to be straight and square. Once assembled, the frame as a whole has some twist (3 corners touching the bench leaves the 4th corner 4-5mm off the bench). Assuming the individual sides are square and straight, I think this means that inaccuracies in my hand cut joints are angling the sides to produce the problem. How would you go about troubleshooting this to identify which corners are contributing to the problem? I think it has to be primarily the two corners next to the corner that is off the bench, doesn’t it? All tips welcome.
 
Being the cowboy I am I might not do anything. If the frame is going to be fixed in place then some twist can be taken out when fixing it in place. If gentle to moderate pressure can persuade it to lie flat then I would ask myself if it is worth the effort to correct it and simply use the screws and frame fixings to hold it in place.
It would be different with a casement or sash.
 
It’s a casement. Should have said casement in my original, sorry about that.

I took the high corner apart, leaving other corners attached. This caused the side coming from corner C to rise and side from corner A to fall indicating a problem at corner C. I looked closer and could see that in fact the long side at that corner did have a slight twist. To fix, I enlarged the mortice on that side by trimming the outside at the top and the inside at the bottom resulting in a mortice whose sides were approximately parallel with the bench when that side was resting in its relaxed position on the bench. This allowed all sides to slot together with their backs flat on the bench and looks like the tenon still has enough contact.

I’ve still got a tiny corner wobble, but it’s less than 1 mm so I think that’ll be OK to glue up now?
 
Last edited:
FFS. The wobble is the least of my problems. I’ve cut all the joints with the rebate the wrong way round.

And I can’t deepen the rebate to the required depth without cutting below the top layer of my bridle. Awkward. I could maybe recover by using a different moulding.
 
Last edited:
It was useful to go through the troubleshooting process on this frame, but I’m remaking it afresh with the rebates in the right orientation rather than try and fix this one. The wood will probably go to my workbench extension.
 
Back
Top